ECOLOGY
   Humans are the most successful consumer of resources that Earth has produced. Our success has altered our planet. Humanity is currently experiencing limits to further growth. We have consumed the easily developed resources across most of our world. We are now faced with more people consuming fewer resources at a higher relative cost. Unchecked this trend will create the same results as in past human history: famine, war and disease.
   The combination of human population explosion, global warming, commercial fish depletion, ocean acidification, depletion of underground aquifers, top soil erosion, and global resource consumption insure that human civilization will be collectively stressed. By 2050 we will have 50% more people, most of them in teaming cities; the commercial ocean fisheries will have collapsed eliminating the fish protein more than one billion depend on; huge expanses of the bread basket crop lands will no longer have water available to grow grains; fresh water will be limited in the Mediterranean, southwestern North America, north and south Africa, the Middle East, central Asia and India, northern China, Australia, Chile, and eastern Brazil. Less food, less water, and more people crowded into ever larger cities insure that global quality of life will be in dramatic decline.
   In the 1970s, I was taught the first and second laws of thermodynamics. These theorems work really well in the ideal gas law and information theory. Thermodynamics explain how systems large and small tend to increase the total entropy of the universe. I generalized the concept in my own mental simplification that assumed all things in the universe are decomposing to their simplest elements. Quantum thermodynamics was beyond my grade level so I did not yet know that classic thermodynamics does not apply at the subatomic level. As I revisit my old simplistic assumption; I observe that the stars making up our universe start as a collection of simple gasses and then mature to create all of our heavy elements. An evolutionary model of our universe would show the stars which comprise it evolving from the simple to the complex and eventually collapsing back to the simple. Likewise, life’s natural evolution generally favors the complex organism over its simpler predecessor in the endless battle for resources. Limited resources seems a fundamental universal constraint from the sub-atomic to the galactic.
   India has 17% of the world’s population and yet it currently has access to only 4% of the world’s fresh water reserves. India’s modern industry and population growth consume water at unsustainable rates. A US report, based on findings from NASA satellites, show that from 2002 to 2008, the volume of ground water available in Indian aquifers has decreased by 26 cubic miles, apparently due to the aquifers being drained faster than nature is replenishing them. Despite two giant groundwater reservoirs recently discovered in the Qaidam Basin, China’s North China Plain region is rapidly losing its water reserves. Similarly, many locations in the United States are already undergoing water stress. Water stress created by the combination of ecological damage, population growth, industrial growth, and climate change is guaranteed to mean large communities are soon to face inadequate water supplies in the near future. The nonprofit Population Reference Bureau (prb.org) summarizes the status of the Middle East and North Africa:

"The challenge of addressing freshwater shortages in MENA [Middle East and North Africa] is exacerbated by the region’s ongoing population pressures. Tapping new sources of water to meet the increased demand for fresh water would relieve some of the region’s shortages, but as new sources of water become more expensive, they become less accessible to low-income countries, given those nations’ limited financial and technical opportunities. At the same time, these low-income countries are often experiencing the fastest population growth in the region."

   Add to the water shortages the world wide decline in arable farm land. In the next century, food and water are going to be more expensive. People can forgo expensive petroleum products, but food and water are the stuff of life. Historically, societies facing loss of these resources have responded with massive population migrations.
   Greg Okin, professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles as quoted in Discover Magazine, May 2010:

"Desertification is happening today around the world, most notably in northern China, home to much of that nation’s 1.2 billion citizens. The world needs more food, more land to grow it, and more water to irrigate it, yet we have the same amount of land, less water, and higher temperatures," …"This is a train wreck about to happen that will impact hundreds of millions of people now and perhaps billions in the future, because that’s how many live in dry lands worldwide."

   I expect water wars by mid-century. Biological warfare might be a cost effective alternative to conventional invasion; providing a means to eliminate neighbors competing for scarce and valuable land and water resources without damaging those resources themselves. Many areas threatened by water shortage have a recent history of religious fanaticism. It seems reasonable to predict that the two will merge into mutually justified rationalization for warfare in multiple regions of the world, potentially causing world war three.
Can technology come to the rescue? What would Ray Kurzweil’s world of artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech do to alleviate this looming crisis? Water desalinization and greenhouse agriculture are both expensive. Nano technology and other scientific advances show much promise for capturing energy from the sun which can then be re-purposed to fresh water and food production. Genetic engineering has already produced commercial production of ethanol from modified bacteria. These advances are sure to accelerate. We will have many new options for food and water production. Bill Joy projects that this same nanotech or recombinant life is likely to accidently cause us unexpected problems and the cost of solving such problems must be factored in. In the undeveloped countries, many facing the most egregious shortages are also unfortunately those with some of the highest birthrates in the world. No one can predict how all these factors will interact in our future. I believe that complex systems tend toward the center; extremes being balanced and buffered by complex interdependencies; similar to today’s debates about global warming.
   In his just published book, The World In 2050 — Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future, Laurence C. Smith (vice chairman and professor of geography, and professor of earth and space sciences at UCLA) predicts a future 40 years from now "in which global population has grown by nearly half, forming crowded urban clots around the hot lower latitudes of our planet." He goes on to imagine, "Mighty new poles of economic power and resources consumption have risen in China, India, and Brazil. People are urban, grayer, and richer. Many places are water-stressed, uninsurable, or battling the sea." Laurence Smith expects that in 2050 more than half of the water consumed by drought beset humanity will be shipped to them from northern latitudes. Laurence Smith’s goal in presenting his analysis was similar to mine in this book. He attempts to limit himself to outcomes "deduced from big trends and tangible evidence already apparent today, rather than political ideology or [his] wonderful imagination." In this book I have concentrated on the potential impacts of technology. Laurence Smith focused on the four global forces—demographics, resources demand, globalization, and climate change. Together we see a future where by 2050 humanity is dealing with numerous transformations of our world. We will be unprepared! As Ian Morris summarized "we need to keep the dogs of war on a leash, manage global weirding, and see through a revolution in energy capture…" Humanity’s poor track record as a steward of this earth leads me to suspect that during the last half of this century will see wars, starvation, disease, refugee flows, and a human population crash. Concurrent to these catastrophes we will also be advancing our sciences, and our technology; fumbling through the transformations of the singularity.